


Seraphs

by Anthropos_Metron



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Genre: Action/Adventure, Also Moogles, Apocalypse, Black Materia, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Cetra - Freeform, Cetra Civilisation Collapse, Class Issues, Death and Horror on an Unimaginable Scale, Friendship, Jenova War, Just sayin', Love, M/M, Old-Style RPG elements, Possible Unintentional LOVELESS, Pretty Dark Fic, Remnants Origins Story, Self-Repression, Unrequited Love, White Materia, possible unreliable narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-04
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2020-04-07 17:36:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19089850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anthropos_Metron/pseuds/Anthropos_Metron
Summary: After his defeat in the Northern Cave, Sephiroth establishes himself in the Lifestream. Searching for memories to base his avatars on, he comes across the perfect candidates.A very very dark fic. If you like misery overdose, this is the one for you. Not explicit though; the reason I rated this Mature is simply because of the sheer Four Horseman levels here. It'sdark.More positive endgame. Apart from the beginning and the end, it's written from the first person, for what it's worth. World-building which combines old-style nineties RPGs feelz with social realism. I guess the product is something close to character-based action adventure? Anyway, hope people enjoy.On hiatus at the moment, but I completely intend to return to this at some point.





	Seraphs

**Author's Note:**

> Standard disclaimers, these aren't my characters, I'm not making any IP claim and this isn't being done for commercial purposes. I'm just playing around with the characters because I love FF and writing.
> 
> I’d like to note that I didn’t conceive, draft, or flesh out this with LOVELESS in mind. It was just one of those instances where I did all those things, and then suddenly had a realisation that I’d made something which potentially had massive thematic resonance to something in canon. This seems to happen a lot when I write. It’s kind of irksome, because I don’t want people reading this just to pick out LOVELESS references, but I’ve also accepted that they’re there, albeit not intentionally, and I now kind of have a degree of equanimity about incorporating it. So much so that I’ve actually adopted the fact that the story _does_ have a relationship to LOVELESS, but I’ll detail how I think it does only at the very end. But where you do spot the references, it was almost certainly not intentional – or perhaps only subconscious on my part. Okay, so once I’d made the realisation I did put in a _few_ , but not anything obtrusive. 
> 
> I know 'Seraphs' isn't the correct plural, but I like it a lot more than Seraphim. :) Hope people enjoy, as ever, thanks for any comments or kudos.

There’s a mighty burn of collision.

There’s a snap in his mind, and he immediately senses, intuitively, that he needs all his strength to maintain his essence, his cohesion. He’s deep within the stream, surrounded, at risk of being broken down and dispersed from a million different points. It would be so comfortable to acquiesce.

It requires an immense focusing of self-discipline to prevent it. Some things are simple dissonance, irritants, and can be released into the stream; extraneous memories of his surface existence, and the early experiences in the stream the first time. Mutinous, atavistic obscenities; shame and guilt and tears, love and kindness, his juvenile desire to defend others from his suffering. The warring hate-love for Red Man - and all the traitorous filth which had been as ballast inside him.

What he focuses on is the vigour that springs from hate. It energises him, it stimulates him; it makes him strong. Hate directed at Him. Eventually, he is a strong flame, white and cold, and at no risk of being extinguished.

Settled, he begins to look around and take stock. He notices there is a thickness in the stream, a viscous curdle of pain and rage. It is growing, as the stream is infused, and he becomes cognisant that it springs from what he has wrought on the surface. This pleases him; it invigorates him when he touches it and when he dances through it.

It comes time to return.

He tries to manifest himself on the surface, but he cannot. It is odd. An awareness rises in him that there is too little in him now to revive. He knows who he is, but not who he was.

Odd.

He can recall how he was stopped by Him, who was once but a puppet, a little facet of himself. That’s the locus of the future. A future cascading out, a future ripped and tore out of Him.

(Yes.)

For now, new puppets. Ones made for purpose. He forms a scheme to draw out a little part of the main stream, and mix it with himself, and then with the black strain, and let the product burst out where the sludge of the black seeps out onto the surface. This can be done.

He spots some threads which might serve his purpose. They are easy to fish; like a whale, they are ponderous and visible. They are old, and have been here a long time. He siphons off what he needs.

Ah.

Oh.

 _Oh_.

Everything about these threads is _perfect_. Delicious beyond all length of appetite.

He begins to craft, to mould physical facsimiles from the memories, and imbue them with a little of him. They will go out and find what he needs, stepping across the surface, as his proxies. In their little ways, he’ll let them write their own stories, righting the wrongs of their lives. They’ve a debt to pay off, after all. Justice for them is ripe. And the last bite is always the sweetest.

Mother has been waiting a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I conceived this story when I watched Advent Children a while back, and I got thinking about the physical templates Sephiroth used for the remnants, and where they originated from. The most likely assumption to me was that they were templates of real people which he had plundered from the Lifestream. Which raised an obvious question.
> 
> Then I read On The Way To A Smile, and was a little surprised that it agreed with me. Kadaj is created from a memory in the Lifestream, and though it’s not specified, presumably Yazoo and Loz are as well. So that was interesting. So I got thinking about who these people were when they were alive, before Sephiroth tomb-robbed the memories of them in the afterlife of the Lifestream. I applied a little bit of Sephiroth thinking, a little bit of Jenova logic, and – oh.
> 
> Oh. Oh.
> 
> (The part I note above about Sephiroth mutilating himself by divesting himself of most of his memories is also from OTWTAS – it’s noted a few times and is the reason given as to why he can’t directly manifest himself on the surface. I know there are some fics about Sephiroth being redeemed as late as Advent Children, but if he’s deliberately and consciously made himself an automaton and outright flushed his pre-Niebelheim personality, I don’t think there’s anything there anymore to redeem by that point. He’d be more like a sentient disease than a personality; you can’t eliminate what his nature has become.)


End file.
